Grape & Grain | Why Chinese millennials buying wine online is a phenomenon ripe for research
Which elements of an online wine advert matter most to buyers, Master of Wine candidate investigates as she tackles final leg of exhaustive qualification process by writing research paper
It wasbound to come to an end eventually. Having spent years fantasising about the cloud of bliss life would be if only I could pass all my Master of Wine exams and “just” have the research paper left, I now find that peachy cloud slowly evaporating and myself settling into the rather less fantastical realisation that there’s still work to do.
This is not to say that I don’t find my topic really rather interesting – I more or less took all the sexy topics I could think of and jammed them into one research paper: “selling wine”, “to Chinese”, “millennials” “online” However, with a whole 500 survey responses I need to log before January 31, it begins to occur to me that I really ought to get cracking.
The research paper is the often glossed over third portion of the Master of Wine exam (technically, yes, it is an exam, even though, thankfully, I’m allowed to do it from the comfort of my home office/cocoon). When completed, it should be an original piece of research on a wine-related topic that expands the global wine community’s collective knowledge base.
While this used to necessitate the gathering of hard data, forcing many a would-be Master of Wine into an unfamiliar world of lab coats, pipettes and conical flasks, mercifully, as of a few years ago, the scope of inquiry has been greatly broadened so that now candidates can delve into subjects as diverse as history, literature and anthropology. Personally, I decided long ago that sticking to what I know (consumer research) was the best way to preserve my sanity this 2016-17 academic year.
My inquiry itself is fairly straightforward. The goal is to gauge which particular elements of a wine’s product page are more likely to get somebody to hit “buy now” and which are the digital equivalent of window dressing, i.e. nice to have, but hardly the determining factor. All those close-up shots of bottle punts and unwrinkled foil capsules you will see if you keep scrolling down on a Tmall product page leap to mind, but only the research will tell.